The Cambridge Introduction to Byron

A clear, jargon-free and comprehensible survey of a diverse and voluminous canonical British author.

Richard Lansdown (Author)

9780521128735, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 29 March 2012

192 pages, 1 b/w illus. 1 map 3 tables
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.9 cm, 0.31 kg

'Lansdown is just the sort of fair- but sharp-minded critic one needs in an introduction like this. He provides a great deal of information, and clearly knows the scholarly field, but does not allow his story to be dragged into a swamp of academic debate.' The Year's Work in English Studies

Author of the most influential long poem of its era (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) and the funniest long poem in European literature (Don Juan), Lord Byron was also the literary superstar of Romanticism, whose effect on nineteenth-century writers, artists, musicians and politicians - but also everyday readers - was second to none. His poems seduced and scandalized readers, and his life and legend were correspondingly magnetic, given added force by his early death in the Greek War of Independence. This introduction compresses his extraordinary life to manageable proportions and gives readers a firm set of contexts in the politics, warfare, and Romantic ideology of Byron's era. It offers a guide to the main themes in his wide-ranging oeuvre, from the early poems that made him famous (and infamous) overnight, to his narrative tales, dramas and the comic epic left incomplete at his death.

Preface
1. Life
2. Context
3. The letters and journals
4. The Poet as pilgrim
5. The Orient and the outcast
6. Four philosophical tales
7. Histories and mysteries
8. Don Juan
9. Afterword
Further reading
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]